Forget the Shots, Just Eat the Worms

[peristaltor]

About a year ago I posted about a link between intestinal auto-immune disease and worms. Turns out some diseases just disappear if you have worms in your gut. Really.

Well, David Corcoran of the New York Times Science Podcast Science Times just interviewed Dr. David Pritchard about his use of intestinal hookworms to treat hay fever. That's right, worms in your tummy might just suppress your body's overreaction to pollen and dander:

“The allergic response evolved to help expel parasites, and we think the worms have found a way of switching off the immune system in order to survive,” he said. “That’s why infected people have fewer allergic symptoms.”

To test his theory, and to see whether he can translate it into therapeutic pay dirt, Dr. Pritchard is recruiting clinical trial participants willing to be infected with 10 hookworms each in hopes of banishing their allergies and asthma.

Never one to sidestep his own experimental cures, Dr. Pritchard initially used himself as a subject to secure approval from the National Health Services ethics committee in Britain.

Though he has just finished Phase I of his clinical trials and moving on to Phase II, he is insistent that people wait for his research to run its course before more of them do what many have started doing -- traveling to Tijuana to buy and ingest the worms.

Tequilla!